“Cornell continues to lag behind scores of universities and colleges across the country who have taken much more robust steps to protect targeted and potentially targeted members of their communities,” he said.

The GPSA passed Resolution 9, aimed at protecting Cornell’s Graduate Students from the Trump Administration’s Immigration Ban, and other future immigration-related issues which may prevent students from completing their education at Cornell, on Monday.

On Friday, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order banning Syrian citizens indefinitely and citizens of seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — from entering the United States for 90 days. This order includes citizens of those countries who had previously been granted refugee status and currently enjoy permanent legal status in the United States and citizens of allied nations such as Canada and the U.K. who happen to originate from one of the listed countries. As U.S. authorities began detaining an increasing number of people, protesters began to flood airports across the country. Beyond those directly affected, the order has serious ramifications for the entire country: family members separated from each other, such as an Iranian mother separated from her five-year-old son at Washington’s Dulles International Airport; tenured scientists hindered from continuing their work, such as computational biologist Samira Asgari, who was “very shocked that all [her] efforts, that all [she had] done, can be undone – just like that.” American universities have since advised their foreign students against making international travel plans and find the strength of their educational and research efforts at risk. Over 20 percent of Cornellians are international students, and many others participate in programs abroad.